DJ Shadow mixes up ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ score

Grand Theft Auto V is in stores as of today, September 17, and DJ Shadow is in on the celebration with a Rockstar Games-blessed arrangement of the game’s musical score (via DJShadow.com). Woody Jackson (Red Dead Redemption composer), Tangerine Dream, and Ohno & Alchemist all created music for GTA V, with their stylistically unique approaches coloring the characters of Trevor, Michael, and Franklin, respectively. Shadow’s arrangement draws from these three threads, combining into one of the DJ’s trademark musical collages.

DJ Shadow, a Davis, California, native, first established himself in the global music scene with the 1998 release of Endtroducing, an album of flowing hip-hop beats composed entirely out of samples. He’s released a number of albums since then, and toured multiple times with Jurassic 5 DJ Cut Chemist on all-45s mix sessions. He also produced the score for the documentary Dark Days. More a composer in the traditional sense than a beatsmith, Shadow is an ideal choice for distilling GTA V‘s dynamic score into something accessible to the casual listener. Check out some of his work here and here, and find even more on his website (also linked above).

Shadow’s site notes that you can listen to the GTA V score on his website starting today, but there’s only a playlist of music from the game’s radio stations up right now. When we hear more, we’ll update this news accordingly.

You know by now from our review that we’ve got one of the premiere releases of 2013 on our hands in GTA V. We ran through some of the more technical aspects of the game in a follow-up to the review that ran Monday, and you can feel free to head over there, if you’ve got any deep-dive questions that you’d like to have answered before you start playing.